Format: 13,5 x 20,5
ISBN: 978-953-7760-51-9
Pages: 248
Binding: paperback
Published: 2014.
12,00 €
Letters to his Wife 1914-1917
My dearr heart, my lovely little one – thus begin the gentle letters Henri Barbusse wrote to his wife a hundred years ago. What follows is by no means gentle – trenches, shells, mud and the dead, the war that is revealed in its bloody meaninglessness. In the year 1914. the writer of letters, Henri Barbusse, was 41, had a reputation as a writer and editor, was not in the best health and had firm pacifist beliefs. Despite all this he volunteered for the French Army and spent the two first years of war on the front lines – and wrote his novel Under Fire, literary testimony of the World War I, which earned him the Goncourt prize and thousands of readers. Documentary material on which is based his novel is found in the letters he wrote almost daily to his wife Hélyonne. In their immediacy and authenticity, those letters can convey to the reader of today the drama of the beginning of the “short twentieth century” better than any fiction.
Slični naslovi
Point Nemo
14,00 €Mladen Kopjar is an author with extensive experience in writing different types of literary texts. In “Point Nemo”, his first collection of poetry, this experience is reflected in the ease and skill with which he builds his poetic world, as well as in his thoughtful and consistent poetics. The origins of the poems are usually in everyday life, its spaces, objects, small events, memories, but thanks to the gift of observation and skillful selection of details, the author skillfully avoids the superficiality and banality of “realistic” writing. Freedom and imagination lead him from concrete experience to surreal images in which personal associations are mixed with various fragments from the ubiquitous virtual space. But the unique tone of this collection stems from the deep emotionality with which the whole is imbued; the author addresses (or talks about) his loved ones: wife, child, parents, meandering through areas of tenderness and pain. In that intimate space, the outside world is mirrored in flashes; the original clash between an authentically, intensely internal world and a diverse, sometimes aggressive external world gives this poetry strength and interest.
Yearning for Spring
18,00 €This prose-poetry reader could prove to be one of the key events of the Anglo-Croatian literary exchange in 2025: in it, translator and poet Goran Čolakhodžić brings a selection of prose and verse by the English early modernist, Edward Thomas, one of the most important voices of British poetry and of the generation of artists who perished in the Great War, and a close friend of the American classic Robert Frost. The rhythms of his verse are quiet and unobtrusive; he was above all a poet of the earth, trees, birds, and the human relationship with nature, but his poetry is also characterized by subtle psychological insights and is overshadowed by the coming world conflict. In addition to tackling Thomas’s rhymed verse and selecting some of the most successful fragments from Thomas’s nature writing, travel journals and articles, Čolakhodžić also wrote a critical preface, notes and his own artistic text juxtaposed with Thomas’s – a diary of the arrival of spring in Zagreb in 2025, which highlights the similarities and differences between England and Croatia, the 19th and 21st centuries, reminding us of the impact that climate change and people’s problematic relationship with nature have on our daily life. The painter Iva Valentić provided stunning artistic responses to the texts collected here, connecting Far Eastern techniques with Western literature.
All My Loved Ones But Me
13,00 €Luka Mavretić’s third poetry collection “All My Loved Ones But Me” is a series of “inner journeys” – journeys that the author announces in the first poems of this very thoughtfully built piece. The young poet balances between lyrical verses and prosaic sentences, he strives towards a refined simplicity and manages to create a conversational tone, which is an important building block of his poetical world. An abundance of motives and a diary-like directness make this book an interesting and fresh collection. Even though he uses interpunction which creates finished, harmonical sentences and gives the text a prosaic tone, his verses remain verses, lines with a natural and easy flow. Despite a breezy atmosphere that the author creates, this is a collection of well thought-through and refined texts – Luka Mavretić is a poet who, in an alchemy of words, transforms chosen glimpses of reality into memorable and luminous images.
